Michael Giacchino's Musical Medal of Honor

Share.

Composer discusses his work on the latest installment of EA's WWII franchise.

By Spence D.

It's not hard to notice that Hollywood composer Michael Giacchino, a man best know for his work on such films and television projects as The Incredibles, Mission: Impossible III, and Lost, has something of a jones for World War II era adventures. I mean how else do you explain his ongoing love affair with EA's Medal of Honor videogame franchise (Giacchino has also worked on competitor Activision's Call of Duty series, to boot)?

"You know what, a lot of it comes out of the fact that if you look at the games I've worked on they've almost all been with people that I started out in [the movie/television] business with," explains Giacchino matter-of-factly. "That said, a big part of the jobs I look for include asking myself 'Am I going to enjoy working on it?' and 'Am I going to like the people I'm working with?' In the case of Medal of Honor, I've worked with Patrick Gilmour for years. I know him so well and we're really good friends. To me a big draw to coming back to it was that Patrick was involved in it again. I'm not the kind of person that necessarily will take a job to take a job. There has to be reasons. The other big overriding reason, especially with Medal of Honor, was that I just love how seriously they take the subject matter. I love how respectful they are with it. I love how reverent they can be with it. I love that they allow it to be not just adrenaline based, but emotionally based, as well."

To date Giacchino has worked on no less than five Medal of Honor titles going all the way back to the franchises inaugural installment in 1999. Having been involved in a recurring franchise for so long a composer is bound to recycle, whether consciously and/or unconsciously some of their previous themes. "There were some select themes that I did go back to," Giacchino freely admits. "But I used them in a very different way. Because the area that they were originally written for was being re-visited in this game. I usually don't just write generic themes that can be used wherever. It's always an area specific thing or a character specific thing. It's kind of an operatic approach in which every character has a theme and every location has its own theme. Which was really a huge deal for Medal of Honor because there were so many locations and so many different places you could go, we really always wanted them to have their own hook to them. In this one they included an operation which happens around the time Market Garden, so I was able to go back and pull a couple of those themes and do new things with them, which I kind of always wanted to do anyway."

It's not much different from a composer who works on a continuing film franchise in which they keep core elements of the original score, tweaking it, rearranging it, and adding to it as each subsequent installment unfolds. "The main core element that was kept here was the Medal of Honor theme, the main theme," says Giacchino. "It survives in kind of a big way for this game. That's for sure. After that it was only about picking any additional elements from the other scores that made sense story-wise. If it didn't make sense story-wise, then I didn't want to go back and just re-hash what I had done. That's not one of the reasons I took the job. I usually love taking it because I find something new that can be done."

In terms of the score Giacchino once again employed the use of a full symphonic orchestra. "Absolutely!," he exclaims. "We had about an 80-piece orchestra that we recorded with. Maybe 83 or something like that. The thing about recording with an orchestra, if you know your orchestration you don't necessarily need a 100-piece orchestra. You can make a 65-piece orchestra sound huge. The original Medal of Honor used a 65-piece orchestra. It's really about being careful with how you write. Some people think more is better, but it's not always."

All of that said, the greatest obstacle Giacchino had to over come was what he refers to as having to "create something that felt of the Old World, yet a little more mature." Of course some of this was tied into specifically re-visiting old, familiar locales in the game and making the music not only link back to the previous installments, but also sound fresh and vibrant and of the moment in regards to the new game. "Since the new Medal of Honor is about the airborne division, about the point-of-view of the 82nd Airborne, there's a whole new approach to take musically," says Giacchino. "If it was going to be similar to the others, I wouldn't wanted to have done it. But when I saw what it was about there was no question that I was going to be able to do something new and different with it."